Baustelle
Amen

To discuss this fourth album by the band from Montepulciano, I choose to dissect it track by track. I apologize to everyone if this analytical rather than synthetic choice will make me go on too long. But it seems the right way to tackle an album born as a "schizophrenic monster" of very different tracks that emerged as standalone songs. However, we soon discover that, right from the title and from Rachele's eye chosen to illustrate the cover, there is indeed a fil rouge that ties it all together...

"E così sia": twenty-five seconds for just a few notes of exquisite piano craftsmanship. Silence preludes a sound even more hi-fi, strong, and grandiose than the previous "La Malavita".

"Colombo": that Colombo, the squinty lieutenant, the detective in a trench coat who intercepts the soul in the whitewashed tombs of Los Angeles' glossy jet set. And if it had been titled Woodcock it wouldn't have made a difference... The chorus might be a bit too drawn out, but musically it has a very catchy and overwhelming guitar work, making the track work.

"Charlie fa surf": Bianconi is not an Epifanio, he's the real deal. He takes Paroxetine, like the fifteen-year-old who surfs despite the adults and priests nailing his hands to the school desk. So he can afford to mock him (which in heavy rotation is covered by the beeeeep: this thing makes me die laughing). Charlie is a fool. Like you, who are twenty years older, there's not much difference, and it's not your fault, nor his. More than one circle has a chance to close: how far are the lascivious youthful voyeurisms of the Sussidiario! Big hit as cheeky as you want, but as powerful as an Ibrahimovic net.

"Il liberismo ha i giorni contati": a title already spray-painted on certain city walls. With this, they pull off a one-two-three punch of perfect pop song. Killer text. Irresistible the self-irony of Bianconi who "sells records in this awful way".

"L'aeroplano": piloted solely by Rachele. Maybe it's because of the melancholy of its expansion into the cosmos, I don’t know, at the moment it's one of my favorites. It flies over Iraq, you watch it disappear into the vastness and everything seems meaningless, the years you've wasted behind the flame of your life, the tears you've shed over it. What remains? What's the point of the experience you've now gained? The emptiness of the senselessness of existence is entirely in the yearning of that little airplane, so consuming that even love doesn’t suffice as a reason.

Or perhaps not? "L": from the spaceship a few meters above the sky (nothing to do with Moccia!) they pick up signals of your love everywhere. It's your Laura leaving traces everywhere. Peace returns in Iraq. Musically a "Beethoven or Chopin" part two.

"Baudelaire": like Charlie, this one too will be hated to death. Such citationism has never been heard, but to someone who invites me to make my life a work of art and remembers that "in the flowers of the fields lives Piero Ciampi", I forgive everything, including the unnecessary Subsonic-style drivel at the end. And I am not moved only because you can't be moved when such urgency of life is given to you, driving you to go out immediately to sow seeds of the flowers of evil that you want to see flourish abundantly.  

But then you'll find it hard to hold back tears on "Alfredo": if you don't cry on this little waltz, you either have no heart or weren't born in '81. You find the old little box from when you were a kid, the music box that, among a thousand echoes of De André, shows you the sepia-tone frames of an Italy, sinking with today's same bad politics, like the child who fell into the well. And a God deaf to his call and the prayers of an entire nation. A theme, this, recurring throughout the album, the need for the Sacred that you seek, seek, and desperately seek in your atheistic devotion, but cannot find. You had removed this memory, you already knew that they would save Alfredino: all the TV stories ended well. And instead, for the first time, you discover death: they send it to you live, coining the format that, from there, would overwhelm us with so many and many television leavings like plastics of Cogne, stairs of Garlasco, knives of Perugia... Perhaps, the peak of Bianconi's career as an author.

"Antropophagus": another potential winning single. It takes off epically like "I provinciali." Romanians, Russians, and Lithuanians in Milan's Corso Como, which is the same as the Central Station, where between a Peroni and a can of tuna, a meal is consumed à la Hannibal! Very Pulp! And not those of Jarvis Cocker, for once! Where will radios put the beeeeep here?

"Panico!": Rachele and Francesco play at duetting like Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. The poor great Lee is indeed who the piece is dedicated to. Who has caught the contagion "These boots are made for walking" and attaches it to us. It sounds just identical to that! But that's its charm. Because it lets us breathe amidst so much pain of living. Effect Xanax.

"Dark Room": author the poet Francesca Genti. Broken singing à la "Revolver". Rachele's seductive bossa nova that takes the verses to the Olympus where she is the only goddess, even though she invokes others in the dark of a private room with ugly and stupid music, where she ends up having a hasty and depersonalized encounter like a cigarette smoked and crushed on the parquet. Because the gods of life are mean ("La vita va"): another disillusioned Baustellian march that Bastreghi marks amidst 70s noir bell tolls.

"L'uomo del secolo": another goodbye, that of a centenarian who despises the world as much as we do. Who is, in fact, Bianconi's grandfather. And you might say who cares. But you can tell the track is a sincere dedication.

"Andarsene così": introduced by a soft and jazzy Italian-house pianism, with a festive crowd and whistles in the background that almost resembles a ketamine rave. Suspension that makes one fear the arrival of a techno 4/4 clumsy track and instead takes off with baroque violins and clarinets that not even Rondò Veneziano..! A close that opens a glimpse of hope (as was "Cuore di tenebra"), represented by the courage of a loving escapism trying to make it absolutist and divine.

And, in reverse (that is, sent in rewind before track 1) "Spaghetti western": clever choice to de-trivialize this title with a text where spaghetti are indeed discussed! Those with tomatoes grown by immigrants who endure all sorts of abuse to work, but unfortunately, the Foggia desert is not Sergio Leone's, and there is no Lee van Cleef or Clint Eastwood acting as an enforcer. So, with almost punk cheekiness, between twang guitars and whistling of maestro Alessandroni (the one from Morricone's soundtracks) parades another bitter Polaroid of our times.

Here and Now (that is, right now in little Italy) there is no one at the levels of this album. Now that I've finished my notes, if I said this album is a masterpiece it would be an exercise in style as if I criticized it. As often happens when you touch too personal strings, these songs cannot be reviewed. They can only be recommended, gently, to be inhabited. To maybe hate them later. Or to adore them as a fetish.